Pickledtezcat Game Devblog

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It's been a while since I posted here. I worked hard on Vinland; 1936 and got a playable demo up and running. But there were quite a few problems with it.

I could have continued with the project as it was and finished adding all the art resources, but the game seemed so flawed that it just wasn't worth the effort.

So once again I'm starting out from scratch. This time I'm going to be taking on board some gameplay elements that I've picked up from some other games I've played recently. I'm also going to avoid adding any art until the gameplay is all finished.

For now I'm using some stand in assets that I created this afternoon;

With luck I should be able to get the game to a playable state quite quickly. This time I'm going to get testers to try it out before spending any time on art assets.

It's been a while since I posted here because I'm moving most publicity for this game over to a facebook page. You can see it here.

Right now I'm working on buildings, I've done a mock up of some to show the damage progression from pristine to bullet marked to fully destroyed.

There are some buildings at the back which are going to be used for a different map type, the "destroyed city" map. I hope to have several different map types, including winter and fall, desert and this one. It will represent later parts of the game where the defenders have fallen back to positions in their cities and are fighting desperate urban warfare.

I greatly reduced the rate of fire of the rockets and made them smaller. A single 60mm rocket now takes up the same space as a machine gun. A single vehicle should mount a large number of rockets to take advantage of their power.

I also added a delay after a weapon is successfully fired. This means the rockets will fire in a staggered volley instead of all at once. I tried both styles and this looks better and creates less logic spikes.

I think it needs more smoke and I'll be adding some rocket trails too.

I'm still unsure of where to put the rockets in the tech ladder. In real life the Russians developed their rockets before the German invasion. They were first deployed in 1941.

These early rockets were quite small though larger ones were developed later.
The Germans designed and tested their first rockets as early as 1940 but they were not deployed until 1941. Larger rockets were introduced later.

The rockets weren't mounted on vehicles until 1943, by which time the Amer…

I finished working on the code for adding foliage and having some extra time I decided to experiment with the code for rockets.

The original idea I had was that rockets would be large vehicle components that can be fired very quickly, regardless of how much manpower is used for reloading.

They would use up a lot of ammo, so they would run dry after a short but devastating barrage.
The problem here is that it's easy to take advantage of this by adding a lot of ammo, which is much smaller than in bulk than the rockets.

There's also the problem of firing large caliber rockets. In real life rockets of up to 30cm were used, but I think that will be too powerful for the scale of combat in this game.

lol. Somehow that one trooper survived the mother of all explosions...

A 30cm rocket could contain nearly 30KG of explosive. That would be a very large explosion.

I've tried to balance the game by using a simple equation to make bigger guns more powerful, but hopefully not too powerf…

Right now I'm working on the game's effects. Explosions, physical reactions, sounds etc...

It's not easy to add really great effects without putting a drain on the Blender Game engine, so things will be as good as I can make them, but not at the expense of frame rate.

Here's an enemy tank being bombarded by rockets. Hits by enemy weapons cause a vehicle to shake and rock. Later there will be more effects, such as rocket trails and a big explosion when the vehicle is destroyed.

Here some infantry are getting hit by small arms fire. You can see the red section of their status bar increasing. This shows they are heavily shocked. When that happens their rate of fire and accuracy is decreased and they also can't move quickly.

Finally here are some PBIs getting hit by automatic 40mm cannon fire. Machine guns and auto-cannons are very effective against enemy troops out in the open. The large caliber model also does splash damage, increasing the damage and shock value it c…

I've started work adding trees back in to the game. They look nice already with the mipmaps turned off. I think I've got the color match with the ground for summer trees.

The trees have a "shadow only" object which helps reduce rasterizer usage and match the shadow with the lamp. I'm not 100% happy with the trees right now, but I hope they will get better as I make more of them and refine the textures a little. I really don't want to waste any more time just fiddling with them. In a few days I'll take another look and see if I can see where the problem is. I think maybe the ground color is too uniformly light. It needs some more dark areas and contrasting sections.

I decided to go with the hollow health bars, I like the effect. More than the black bars.
I've also finished adding recoil and other physical effects to the vehicles. Even the guns move, with the main gun swiveling to track the enemies. It also tilts for range if it is a support or artiller…

It's been a while since i posted any updates. It's not tat I haven't been busy, only that the work hadn't reached a point where it was worth showing.
It's been a lot of small incremental changes, building a modular menu system with widgets and buttons, porting over some of my old code for displaying vehicle models etc...

This is just a dummy menu at the moment. From here I can set the active profile, manage vehicles for testing and jump right in to an in game testing environment.

Each chunk of screen space like this is a widget. It can have a number of buttons. The buttons react to being moused over and clicked. They send a message to the widget to decide how to deal with that interaction. The widget then executes some code and might reset the menu page or load a different one.

Clicking manage vehicles loads this menu:

I've moved some of the structural elements of vehicles away from components mounted in the vehicle and in to a system of options which modify ho…

Pickledtezcat

I'm an English teacher living in South Korea, I'm married and have two young sons, which makes it rather difficult to devote much time to my projects, but whenever I can I try to sit down and write some code or make some content and keep on building my dream.